Logic Pitfalls in Marketing Automation

One of the biggest mistakes I see is with the Job Title field. Most firms allow a free text entry in Title because Title is a personal value that can vary widely.

Occasionally, a firm will use a Role field with fixed picklist values to help segment the database more clearly. The Role is filled in by the Lead, but sometimes is backfilled based on human work or automation. Of course, if a Lead lies on either Title or Role, then there isn’t much filtering can do here.

The mistake marketers make is with the operator “CONTAINS.” Inexperienced marketing automation users (and those without Boolean experience) will simply say:

Title IS “Vice President, Sr. VP, SVP Operations”

OR

Title CONTAINS “vice president, intern, VP, CIO” etc…

What happens when we do this?

Results from CONTAINS

Vice President

Sr. Vice President

SVP

SVP Operations

SVP Sales

Intern

Sr. VP International

Sr. Mgr, International

International Sales Mgr

Results from IS

Vice President

Sr. VP

SVP Operations

The solution is to be more specific with your operators and use boolean logic with several filters to pinpoint the proper group of people.

What you thought was a simple IS/CONTAINS problem, is easily solved with more filters, properly managed. Not that we have to exclude Negative Titles List.

You can do the same with Intern* vs. international and CFO or C-level. I will often use a series of smart lists in the same way:

(Smart List 1 = Exact Match “High Value Titles”

OR

Smart List 2 = Contains “High Value Titles”)

AND

Smart List 3 NOT IN Exact Match of “Low Value Titles”

That Negative List covers the wrong people, thus you can exclude them in case they get into your High Value List:

Right now, Marketo does not allow Regex or wildcards to do something like “Intern*” or include “intern*” but not “intern”.

Stay tuned for next week’s logic lesson…but you’ll have to sign up for email updates!

Disclosure: Perkuto provided access to a Marketo instance for this post.